Fluid medicines are often stored in vials for dispensing with a syringe. A common type of vial is the open circle lens vial. This type of vial is familiar to anyone who has gotten a shot at the doctor's office, and typically has a thin metal top cover which protects a pierceable membrane that is sealed to the rim of the vial. Some modern vial covers have a plastic frame that rotates around the vial rim to align with a marking on the vial to indicate it is in proper opening position. The plastic frame then facilitates opening the metal cover that is attached to the frame. When the frame is pried up, the metal cover tears open across the top and down the side of the vial, the thin metal then breaks into two or more segments along the rim of the vial for easy removal of the frame and the metal cover to expose the membrane to be pierced by a syringe.
The problems with the standard open circle lens vials described above include the requirement to align markings on the plastic frame and the vial prior to opening and the creation of sharps by the metal segments of the cover.
Aligning markings can be difficult if the ambient lighting is poor or if the nurse has poor eyesight. Even when markings are aligned, the frame may not lifted up as expected if the tolerance for the markings is too strict so that one has to experiment through trial and error to make the alignment work. If the tolerances for the alignment are too loose, it defeats the purpose of aligning the markings in the first place.
Hospitals and doctors' offices are always conscious of sharps such as needles and have protocols and equipment to isolate and dispose of sharps. This is particularly a concern if patients are in the area where there are sharps. It is, therefore, in the interest of medical professionals to reduce the number of sharps in their practice.
There is a need, therefore, for a medical vial cap that is easy to open manually, does not require alignment yet is safe, and which reduces sharps. To provide these advantages, certain features of the bottle crown described in the patents and patent applications related to this application have been adapted here to medical vial caps, in particular the opener assembly and the score lines, which advantageously allow a medial vial cap to be opened in a manner comparable to the beverage bottle cap previously described.